Mares Sten Bluewater 133 Pneumatic

What shaft thickness do you have or want to use? Could you load 8 mm shaft, about 40 kgf?

kwtony said:

I am trying to find that out. 8mm is a thick shaft. I shouldnt have any problems with that kind of force then again, you never really know. I grab my friends 110 by the barrel and by the shaft and load it with no issues.

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110 is probably Cyrano or Spark with 7 mm shaft, maybe 30 kgf loading force.

If you can load it without turning yourself inside out then use it. The absence of comments on the longest rear handle pneumatic guns here is mainly due to them being too difficult to load, due to their combined spear and gun length, for many divers unless extended loaders are used to increase the diver's personal reach or you use a shaft winching system instead as Tromic has shown with his "airgun easy loader". I think using an extended loader is inherently more risky, the connecting cords can break, but that doesn't necessarily preclude their use. Keeping well away from other water users means that an escaping shaft during loading will have less serious consequences.

A second shaft clipped to the gun will make it still a non-floater after the first shaft is fired, but in your part of the world there seems to be a lot of second shaft equipping of band guns. As you load a pneumatic from the front end you will need to be wary of the extra spear tip poking out the front end of the gun, so a tip cover will be a good idea for that shaft. I guess that you could reverse the extra shaft on the gun as an additional safety precaution.

Everything else sounds OK, however a vacuum barrel kit will require the shaft going in with one long push in order not to break the muzzle seal. Muzzle seals that are fixed in the muzzle and work directly on the shaft may tolerate some in, then briefly out, motion without breaking the vacuum seal, but I have never used one. You will then have to use bare (nude) shaft tails without the usual tail stop which may be OK for freeshafting in Florida. The second spear will be a freeshaft anyway as I don't recommend using double shooting lines on a speargun.

Mono is fastest through the water due to the highly smooth surface finish on the line, woven filament cords have more drag due to the twisted weave pattern on the line, but are less susceptible to tiny cuts that can cause mono to snap with a subsequent strong jerk on the line. If you are used to mono then use that for the shooting line and the Kevlar cord on the reel. Your new Koah gun appears to have a mono shooting line. The bottom terrain also has a bearing on the line choice and the depth you are operating in as the more opportunities that the shooting line has to lay along the bottom and encounter sharp edges then the higher the likelihood of the line picking up cuts, so mono is then more susceptible to damage. Because I am sometimes spiral wrapping the shooting line around my pneumatic gun's tubular body to quickly get it out of the way and trapping the discharged spear against the gun body with it at the same time I use woven cord (nylon or spectra) on my pneumatic speargun as mono is too springy for that job. Woven cord is more flexible and the tensile strength is not dependent on the integrity of one strand as it is with monofilament, so you need to consider the application for your hunting area.